North Platte, Neb. ? From running a hamburger stand on the carnival circuit to owning a bar as a single female in the 1950s, Billie Lee Snyder Thornburg has never taken the safe road.

So it doesn’t surprise those who know her that the white-haired bundle of energy not only wrote her first book at age 90, but formed her own publishing company to get the autobiographical piece out quickly.

“No education, not many words to use, even, and how could I do it?” she said.

“I just do what I want to do, and I have big ideas,” said Thornburg, unfazed by the inconveniences of advanced age, in her case a bad hip that forces her to use a cane and hearing loss that requires an aid in each ear.

Deciding to self-publish

Thornburg and children’s-book author Ann Milton last year formed The Old 101 Press, with help from Milton’s daughter Yolanda. The company’s first book was Thornburg’s recollections of her early 20th century childhood, mainly with her younger sister, in Nebraska’s rugged Sandhills.

They printed 3,000 copies of “Bertie and Me — Kids on a Ranch.” Since October, they have sold just over half of them in a four-state area at $18.95 per book, turning an $8,000 profit on their $20,000 investment.

“Sometimes people have this sense of prohibition against self-publication,” said Ron Block, an English professor at North Platte’s Mid Plains Community College. “It’s meaningful writing and a meaningful publication.”

Larger presses are not interested in local stories, leaving regions of the country overlooked unless authors turn to smaller presses, he said.

Thornburg plans to publish two sequels to “Bertie and Me,” along with a collection of short stories about local history, to be written by area residents.

Many chapters in “Bertie and Me” chronicle typical days between 1912 and 1927 as Billie Thornburg and her two-years-younger sister, Bertie Snyder Elfeldt, played out their sibling rivalry on the Ten-Bar Ranch, 12 miles west of Tyron, the only town in Nebraska’s 859-square-mile McPherson County.

That rivalry remains. At a recent reading of the book at the North Platte Library, the sisters — sporting new but temporary barbed-wire tattoos — started arguing about how some little fact really happened in their youth and stopped only when they remembered they were in public.

“It tickled people,” Thornburg said. “We should have gotten into a real good one.”

A different point of view

The book tells how young Billie was forever baiting her younger sister into trouble that usually ended with Bertie earning the lashing of a parent’s tongue or worse. One time, Billie had Bertie show a visiting neighbor, who had one leg shorter than the other, how he walked.

“It seemed to me she did a great job, but Mama was so embarrassed. Bertie received a big scolding,” Thornburg writes.

This is not the first time the family’s history has appeared in print. Thornburg’s older sister, Nellie Snyder Yost, wrote 13 books, including two about their parents, before her death in 1992.

Yost wrote “Pinnacle Jake,” published in 1951, as she sat by her father’s side, listening to Albert Snyder’s stories of his youth as a Wyoming cowboy. “No Time on My Hands,” published in 1963, chronicles the life and quilt-making abilities of their mother.

Both surviving sisters are quick to say those books are nothing like “Bertie and Me.”

“Nellie has certainly put down a lot of the family history we’re very proud of, but Billie tells it like it is,” Elfeldt said.

Plainspoken Thornburg is more to the point.

“Nellie sugarcoated stuff a little bit, and it just rubbed me the wrong way when I read it,” she said.

Always adventurous

Starting a publishing company is not as grandiose as Thornburg’s previous business ventures. Aspiring to be a circus or vaudeville performer as a child, Thornburg eventually joined the carnival circuit, overseeing a hamburger stand for a season.

Saying she “always wondered what it was like from the other side,” Thornburg bought the Office bar in downtown North Platte in 1952. She weathered criticism from locals who didn’t think a woman should own a bar, and she got a husband out of the deal when Bob Thornburg walked in one day while home on leave from the Navy.

They married in 1955, but he had a year of duty left in Japan. Billie Thornburg sold the bar a year later and moved to be with her husband.

To keep her mother out of a nursing home, the Thornburgs returned to North Platte in 1977 to care for Grace Snyder, who lived with them for five years until her death at age 100.

Thornburg’s first book grew out of a paragraph she read five years ago at a writers’ group meeting sponsored by Milton, the children’s book author.

“She had a little handwritten paragraph and said, ‘This isn’t any good,”‘ Milton recalled. “I said go ahead and read it, and she did great.”

Thornburg started penning longer stories, and eventually she bought a computer, printing out her first story five hours after the purchase.

Thornburg became more serious about “Bertie and Me” last year, realizing she wouldn’t live forever.

“They say you can’t take it with you, but you can … all the good stories in your head go when you do,” reads a quote from Thornburg atop the Web page of The Old 101 Press.